It took only four months for a five-person group led by business owners Gil Terem and Poplife’s Aramis Lorie to transform Piccadilly Garden into the District Restaurant and Lounge. Since Piccadilly Hearth was renamed and reopened by then-new owner Mary Klein in 1994, the restaurant had earned a reputation among…
Pete Rock’s followup to his 1998 solo debut is a decidedly uneven affair. Like its somewhat overpraised predecessor, Soul Survivor II’s fifteen songs are driven by the Chocolate Boy Wonder’s legendary production skills, yielding tracks peppered with samples from the Natural Four (“It’s A Love Thing”), among other excellent choices…
As the cliché goes, nothing is new anymore. But in the music industry, there’s always a new artisan eager to add his work to the pantheon. In other words, don’t try to ask the newly minted label owners behind Somia Music if its output is similar to the legion of…
Nearly two months have passed since the 2004 Winter Music Conference and it still haunts the Miami dance community like a treasured memory. You can see it at Privilege, which was so empty on a recent Friday night that the raucous breakbeat sounds of Habersham and Dave Preston, together known…
The sound of Tortoise defies categorization. Like the fusion jazz artists of the Seventies who traversed rock and jazz forms with time signature shifts, the Chicago quintet — John Herndon, Doug McCombs, Dan Bitney, Jeff Parker, and John McEntire — makes instrumental music with everything but the break-room sink in…
San Diego production duo Sound Providers specialize in the art of the loop — sampling a jazz track’s choicest four bars and then repeating the results ad infinitum. It sounds annoying, but many of hip-hop’s sonic breakthroughs in the early Nineties — such as Gang Starr’s “Take It Personal” –…
Yesterdays New Quintet’s Stevie originally began life in late 2002 as a promo-only CD manufactured by Triple Five Soul, given out through its Website, and occasionally sold during Stones Throw showcases. Its limited availability turned it into a collector’s item, fetching upward of three figures in online auctions, which eventually…
Andrew “DJ Le Spam” Yeomanson has dubbed his house, a two-bedroom cottage nestled within North Miami, the City of Progress Studio. But it is more akin to a sprawling, overstuffed thrift store. There are toys: kaleidoscopes, dolls, and action figures. The walls are lined with posters for shows the 34-year-old…
Pigeon Funk is a minimal techno side project initiated by San Francisco producers Kit Clayton, Sutekh, and Safety Scissors in 2001. Though originally released as a series of EP-length “battles” among the three artists, the trio’s Pigeon Funk! compilation is still remarkably consistent, a weird collage of scattershot samples and…
If you visited a local record store on Tuesday, March 30, looking for Jacki-O’s long-awaited debut album, Poe Little Rich Girl, you didn’t find it. That is because the Liberty City rapper’s record label, Poe Boy Entertainment, recently lost its distribution deal with Warner Music Group. In a brief phone…
Producer Rey Rubio says of the imminent release of his electro-inflected group Alpha-606’s debut, Computer Controlled, “One thing is, we’ve never been pressured to force it out.” Rubio is not exaggerating. Over the course of a relaxed two-hour interview at his house in Little Havana, the seven-man team behind his…
Madlib’s Madvillain project is the second of his dream matchups, following his slightly disappointing pairing last year with Detroit iconoclast Jay Dee (Jaylib’s Champion Sound). While Jay Dee favors original compositions, track-busting Madlib finds more in common with MF Doom, since the latter’s early-Nineties work with KMD as Zevlove X…
The four years that passed between Modest Mouse’s 2000 album The Moon and Antarctica and its new opus, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, were an eternity. Gone is the world-weary anxiety that girded The Moon … like a vicious, inescapable undertow; in its place is leader Isaac…
On Friday afternoon, March 19, I sat on a bed in an Omni Hotel room in Austin, Texas, and picked up my cell phone, preparing to call Murs. For the past two weeks I had been trying to arrange an interview with the L.A.-based MC, who just released a new…
When It Falls sounds like an extension of a theme first explored on Zero 7’s acclaimed debut, Simple Things. The electronic soul, produced by Sam Hardaker and Henry Binns, vibrates with warmth, and the vocalists, Sia Furler and Sophie Barker, burn slow elocution over it until the music becomes a…
FRI 3/12 If Morrissey’s call to hang the DJ is carried out tonight, then his onetime Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce may be seen dangling from a gibbet. Thankfully the bassist and drummer for the legendary Manchester quartet don’t take Mozzer very seriously. Still why is the duo…
If last weekend is any indication (and as of this writing, there are still three nights left to go), happy days are here again for the sprawling five-day festival popularly known as the Winter Music Conference. “It’s going better than ever,” reports WMC co-founder Bill Kelly from the poolside area…
I remember first hearing Nirvana in 1991, when MTV premiered the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video on its token college-rock program, 120 Minutes. The song was all fuzzy guitars and commercial doublespeak, fueled by Kurt Cobain’s chorus, “Here we are now/Entertain us,” and I immediately turned up my nose at…
It was on an early March morning last year when I fell out of bed, threw on some clothes, and sweatily stumbled down the several blocks or so that took me from the apartment where I was staying with two friends to an imperious-looking hotel on Washington Avenue in South…
The first thing you notice about Lucinda Williams is her voice: raspy and brittle, yet supported by a husky tone that rubs against you. It is rough and comforting, a thin blanket that somehow manages to insulate you from a cold, heartless environment. Her songs, in contrast to her surroundings,…
On Fourth Dimensional Rocketships Going Up, Blackalicious rapper Gift of Gab floats through his own inner galaxy. Seattle producers Jake One and Vitamin D lace him up with beats that are supple and funky, bumping along with an early-Eighties bass vibe; “Welcome Back” is decorated with Seventies soul orchestral strings,…
In hip-hop culture, we tend to refer to hip-hop as a thing, a possession, a living person. It is the spook that sat by the door, the infiltrator into mainstream society, the one that blew up black culture, the great corrupter. Back in the day, Chuck D famously crowned it…
